To Read or Not to Read...

I'm planning to ramble today. This post will not be terribly well-planned, nor will it be carefully edited, so I apologize in advance. I'm feeling so frustrated, lately, that I just have to pour out all my crabbies on to a page somewhere, and let it sit and ruminate for a while. At that point I might be able to make sense of some of it and then develop some kind of plan of attack to alleviate my stress.

(This is a teaching post, FYI, not a parenting post, so if I've lost you already, feel free to click off on this tiresome rant. If you are a teacher, and feel like watching a fellow colleague have a meltdown, then by all means...read on.)

I'm just a little alarmed, okay I'm just a LOT alarmed, at the direction that the written word is taking these days. I know I am from a vastly different era than the 8th graders I see every day, and maybe I'm just OLD, but I truly believe that classics are timeless. If a person is motivated to read something, and has the reading skill necessary to read it, then I have a responsibility as a teacher to expose them to GOOD literature.

The problem lies in the fact that it is becoming really difficult to do the first two parts of that last sentence. Middle-schoolers sometimes not possess the reading skills to access good literature. But even more troubling, they often lack the motivation to try. Don't get me wrong - I do have students who come to me passionate about the written word; I do have kids who love to read. But the number of kids who don’t read regularly is growing every year.

In today's fast-paced Insta-World (I'm going to coin that phrase - remember you heard it here first ) I am losing ground in the battle to convince them that the journey is worth it. So often I see a student pull themselves out of a reading and say "this is too hard." They shrug their shoulders, pull out their smart phone and open up Flappy Bird. They want instant access to facts (thank you, Google) they want instant feedback on their daily activities (thank you, Facebook) they want instant access to their friends (thank you, Snapchat) they want to IM and Skype and Facetime. The payoff during this technological firestorm we live in is an Insta-World, where human interaction is at your fingertips, and accessing information and ideas through hard work has become an antiquated art - something their grandparents did Back In The Day.

They have no idea, actually, what the payoff is for doing the work, because they aren't willing to do it. The payoff for doing the work is to become a better thinker, to become more connected to the human condition, to understand something on a level beyond the average thought process of the general population. There is beauty in the process, and it can change the way you perceive the world, change the way you interact with others, and change the core of who you are. It sure isn't easy, but it sure is worth it.

Take Sylvia Plath, for example. Now, you may be a reader…you may even enjoy poetry from time to time. But Sylvia Plath isn’t on anybody’s short list. Do you know why? She writes raw, cynical, painfully honest metaphoric truths. It’s HARD to read her stuff. It’s hard to make sense of it; and when you do, it’s even harder to embrace. Which is precisely why I read it. I feel like I’ve unlocked the door to a higher level of consciousness when I finally figure it out. I wish I could describe what it feels like, that moment when you see something clearly for the first time. That moment when something difficult and vague comes sharply into focus. There comes first a moment of triumph, when you can understand it, followed closely by a wash of emotion when the meaning of the work sinks in. It makes me feel alive in a way that nothing else can. I have more than once set a book down on the nightstand and felt like a completely different person afterward.

That feeling is something I am desperate to communicate every year to the students who sit in desks in my classrooms. They are 8^th graders, so obviously I’m not handing out copies of The Bell Jar or even A Room of One’s Own. Rather, I find myself trying to convince them that The Odyssey is even more exciting than Ridiculousness. (I won’t tell you how often Homer loses that battle…you really don’t want to know.) Mostly, I want them to become aware of the power of the written word. I want just once to change them – to make them feel alive, to make them feel like they might never be the same again after reading something powerful.

Unfortunately, (and here comes the BIG truth…the reason for my great passion and even greater despair today) I have come to the sad realization that the written word as I learned to appreciate it, is dying a slow and painful death.

Technology may be a wonderful thing, but it is absolutely killing language. It is stripping it of its beauty, making it small and mean. My students communicate with each other in the language of robots and computers. I wrote a dialogue on the board in class one day that looked something like this:

“R U going 2nite?”

“N”

“Y”

“B/C. RU?

“Prob”

“K. CU 2MOR”

“TTYL”

“<3”

Every single one of the kids in my class could read it. Right down to the “less than 3” symbol, which they all equate with a heart. They told me this was likely an exchange between good friends since the symbol for love was used.

Really? We equate “love” with “less than 3?” When did that happen?

Even more distressing: I wrote the following stanzas from Emily Dickinson on the board. She knew a few things about love herself:

Heart, we will forget him,

You and I, tonight!

You must forget the warmth he gave,

I will forget the light.

When you have done pray tell me,

Then I, my thoughts, will dim.

Haste! ‘lest while you’re lagging

I may remember him!

Want to guess what kind of response I got? Out of all the kids I showed it to that day, an alarmingly small number (4? 6?) were able to successfully interpret the base meaning of the poem. Once I helped them read the actual words, (What does ‘haste’ mean?) we tackled the idea that the writer is speaking to herself. (What? Why is she talking to herself?) Making sense of the message was next on my list (She likes that he’s warm? That makes no sense, Mrs. G!) You’re right, it doesn’t! Keep trying!

One wise soul suggested that dim meant the writer was stupid to break up with the guy. Almost…but not quite.

I ordered a classroom set of Divergent this year. With all the movie hype, I thought that putting actual books in the hands of my kids was a good use of funds. And hey - it's a pretty good book. It's entertaining; it has some great vocabulary words, (Guess how many of my students figured out that the names of the factions are just "fancy words" for the definitions of the factions' value systems? That's called synecdoche, by the way - good job, Veronica Roth.) It isn't exactly To Kill A Mockingbird, but it's entertaining.

Maybe this is the trend I need to follow. Maybe I need to scrap Shane and my unit on Western Filmography and swap it out for the Next Big Movie Blockbuster. I don't want to believe that True Grit and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and High Noon have run their course in terms of what they have to teach us about justice, loyalty, and the code of honor. Maybe it's just a Hunger Games kind of world out there now...I don't know.

I do know that good reading skills and exposure to good literature has had a profound effect on me, and I will continue to fight the good fight for as long as I can. Tomorrow maybe I’ll hand out a little Shakespeare and see what happens.